Jeremy Gallen's Game Reviews

Gives Homer a Run for His Money

While I was in undergraduate college back in 2007, I had time for gaming in between studies. Then, I discovered the inaugural installment of Atlus’s Etrian Odyssey series, called Labyrinth of the World Tree in Japan and given its English name, originally Yggdrasil Labyrinth, for several reasons, chiefly to avoid confusion with other Atlus-published titles like Yggdra Union and Deep Labyrinth. The experience stuck with me to the point where I happily purchased and played its translated sequels, after which would come the Untold subseries that remade the first two entries. Atlus would ultimately port the first three games under the Etrian Odyssey Origins Collection banner, the first being Etrian Odyssey HD.

The first entry begins in the town of Etria, situated alongside the Yggdrasil Labyrinth, with the player registering an adventurer guild and receiving guidance from the ronin Ren and the hexer Tlachtga, both checking in as players descend the multistoried maze. While players must formulate their backstory on their guild and its luminaries, the labyrinth backstory is intricate, with occasional twists and side stories that abound in the myriad sidequests. The translation doesn’t hinder the narrative experience at all despite some minor stylistic issues, the plotline adopting the “keep it simple, stupid” mantra of RPG stories, but it still works.

Happily, solid gameplay backs the story experience. The player, as mentioned, registers a guild and can create a multitude of playable characters from various classes, including the Landsknecht, which specializes in offense primarily using swords and axes; the Protector, which specializes in defending allies with innate strength, the Alchemist, which uses elemental magic; and the Medic, which of course has a knack for recovering others. Only five can venture through the Yggdrasil Labyrinth at a time, characters organizable into a front and back row, each having a maximum of three adventurers, the former having a higher attack power but lower defense and the latter vice versa.

Players outfit their characters with one weapon, a piece of body armor, and two other equipment types that can be any combination of shields, helmets, gauntlets, boots, or accessories. In the Yggdrasil Labyrinth proper, a colored indicator at the bottom-right (unless the player has the map expanded) turns from blue to red to indicate the closeness of enemy encounters, which may be preemptive on the part of players, the enemies, or neither. In combat, players face one or more enemies and have many options by which to assault them, including attacking normally with their equipped weapon, defending to reduce damage, using a TP-consuming skill, using an item, changing row formation, or attempting to escape, with five chances at maximum for each character.

"I need a scissors icon! 61!"

Characters also have a Boost gauge that fills as they and the enemy exchange blows and gives one a temporary boost in power. Those familiar with classic turn-based RPGs will likely know the structure of their party and the enemies exchanging commands based on agility, with turn order luckily remaining consistent depending upon foes. Survivors earn experience points needed to level alongside parts of the decimated enemies post-battle. How the game handles defeat depends upon which difficulty setting the player has chosen: while Picnic mode is more merciful to players when they die, advanced settings result in a Game Over, though in that case, the player can save their map data.

Each character has a skill tree into which the player can invest points gained from leveling, with higher-level skills unlocked by investing into those lower-tiered and including active abilities that consume TP and passive traits. One can increase specific skills to ten levels, with supplementary effects like increasing speed of execution, which can relieve the typical JRPG issue of enemies beating characters to healing in the case of recovery abilities. Wandering the labyrinth as floating orange balls are Formido Oppugnatura Exsequens, or FOEs, which are superpowered minibosses players should avoid upon encountering them, though fortunately, there is plenty of room for error in doing so.

The game mechanics function well, with the choice of difficulty accommodating players of different skill levels and allowing freshers to the franchise to experience it stress-free while appeasing those who detest easy experiences. Combat speed is adjustable, with virtually every battle transpiring quickly, and the autobattle mode makes fights with weaker foes cinches. The standard encounter rate some may find a little high, although spells are available to reduce their occurrence for a fixed number of steps. Some tavern missions may be difficult without researching the internet but completing them is scarcely necessary to beat the game, accounting for an excellent gameplay experience.

As in the Nintendo DS and 3DS iterations, the first Etrian remaster sports intricate mapping: the player must drag icons from a legend onto an in-game map to indicate doors and secrets among others, draw walls, and color visited tiles. However, a menu setting lets players automatically map tiles and edges that they have encountered, reducing some of the cartographic work. A suspend-save accessible during standard labyrinth navigation accommodates players with busy schedules, with menus within and without Etria being nonproblematic, stat increases or decreases for prospective equipment visible before purchase, and spell and item descriptions present as they should be in modern RPGs. The map creation controls take some getting used to, but Etrian Odyssey HD is the epitome of user-friendliness.

You'll definitely want to go deeper into the Yggdrasil Labyrinth.

The soundtrack remains unchanged from the original game, with composer Yuzo Koshiro demonstrating his musical brilliance with beautiful frequency modulation (FM) synthesis pieces such as the peaceful town tunes, stratum navigation themes, energetic battle music, and occasional cutscene tracks. There are a few musicless places, but the remaster is an aural wonder.

The same goes for the remastered visuals, containing significant polish over the originals on the Nintendo DS, with labyrinth environments having excellent detail, along with great anime-style character portraits and monster designs in combat, even if many of the latter consists of reskins. Most of the same issues from the DS incarnation’s graphics recur, such as inanimate enemies in battle, the popup of distant environs while traversing the labyrinth, and the strict first-person perspective of everything throughout the game, but the remaster is otherwise beautiful.

Finally, one can breeze through the HD remaster in as little as twelve hours, especially on the Picnic difficulty, but tavern quests, Steam achievements, a post-game stratum, and a New Game+ can boost playtime well beyond that limit.

Ultimately, Etrian Odyssey HD is inarguably one of the best RPG remasters, given its increased accessibility to modern gaming audiences, the choices regarding dungeon cartography, the enjoyable backstory during the descent of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth, superb audiovisual presentation, and significant lasting appeal. There are some niggling issues, especially regarding the graphics, but the positives of the port greatly outweigh the negatives in every aspect. The HD version of the original entry of Atlus’s dungeon-crawling franchise is a must-play for anyone with a passing interest in Japanese RPGs and a great start to the Origins Collection, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This review is based on a playthrough of a digital copy downloaded to the player's Steam Deck, played through its dock, on a television, played to the standard ending.